the agony of others: the US Open and its injuries

Expecting a match report and some press feedback on Rafael Nadal's victory last night in the US Open 3rd Round against David Nalbandian, I went to the tennis tournament's website. across the homepage was a video, whose screengrab just looked like a normal press conference. I clicked on it and found this (I feel sort of weird linking to this, as I don't know how I feel about this video being posted):



The most popular video on the US Open site, unavoidable on the scroll-through video gallery which keeps landing you back on it, was nearly 2 minutes of Rafael Nadal wincing and cramping, as the camera, rock-steady, recorded imperviously on. I made it through about a minute before realising 1) they aren't going to cut to anything else, let alone report on the match and 2) this is horrible.

What good is it to me, or anyone, to gawp at a tennis player suffering cramp at a bad time? Some of the comments below were ridiculous - one woman, Elizabeth David if I remember rightly, said that 'it was agonizing - how dare they put up such a video - look at what 'we' put them through'... (the response from another user, predictably deadpan, was along the lines of 'not agonizing enough for you to stop watching...')

Let's pull this into perspective. There are several things going on here. Yes, Elizabeth David, there is something cruel or weird about the posting of this video. But cramp isn't that cruel or weird thing. The odd thing going on with the video is the seeming lack of empathy or sympathy for a player in an awkwardly-timed spot of bother. Even weirder, or greedier, is the way that this footage was immediately advertised - and of course, picked up - by media outlets across the globe, hitting the homepages of ElPais, the Guardian, the Sydney Morning Herald (that at least has a sense of, not a sensationalist, humour) and so on within minutes - as a collapse/ shock/ OUTRAGE!!!

stop! press! RAFAEL SLUMPS TO THE GROUND....with cramp.

Cramp is painful, yes, but it passes. Press conferences too are painful, but they pass, with the same old 'he played well, tough first set, but I played some good points' soundbites. The only thing which makes the press conference special is that we happen to have seen what is an otherwise banal moment in a sports person's life, when thet have to lie back, breathe deep and wait for the spasms to subside.

Nadal's irritation with the persistent camera-snapping silence is understandable. But that's the only thing that makes the video interesting: imagining the silent, poised journos, gawping at an 'agony' that is merely inconvenient. And then this moment becomes the story of the entire game - it eclipses the sport completely. Nadal played a good game, and yet once again, the media will be fawning over this bruised solider, who is pushed 'too hard' by the tennis calendar.

Yes, the tennis calendar is punishing, but I have a feeling that no one is more punishing on himself than Rafael Nadal. The difference between he and Nalbandian was exactly one of mentality, a mindset solidified years ago and now paying off: Nalbandian, as everyone keeps saying, was one of the great hopes of a few years ago. He never really made it, and looking at the match up between he and Nadal yesterday, you could see why. It was written in their bodies, their body language, their movements and muscles. Both have talent, but what differentiates them is the amount of hard work and pain Nadal has put himself through to get to 10 grand slams.

But back to that video a second. It has since been removed from the US Open site, all full 2 minutes of boredom. A few rogue youtube versions remain here.When you relay its contents, it sounds funny (and then first comment for this video is: 'looks like he's getting a blowjob lol'): a world class athlete slowly disappearing from view under a table at a press conference. Fine, that is kind of funny - when you tell it to someone else.

But watch it, without thinking that. What is it that makes the event, the banal insight into an athlete's cramp, creepy? What does that unswerving, anonymous camera remind me of? Michael Haneke's Caché. A film that supremely deals with the mind games caused by the camera, the unglinting focus on the everyday; and how the viewer, intent on finding meaning, will turn the everyday, the uninhibited, into the ominous, the treacherous. (Incidentally, the trailer is a perfect example of the opposite - Hollywood's all powerful need to subsume and convert the tone and focus of any film into a deceptive 'thrill ride'; to reimagine the spasms of the death drive only in relation to death.)

What is baffling about this video and its eeriness is its complete absence of necessity, or even of meaning. (And see how desperately I am now flailing to give it meaning, to fit it into something sensical!)

I understand why it was recorded - but I don't understand why the US Open let it be posted, unedited, to the world. The two minutes are not dissimilar to those two hours of footage of Binoche and Auteil's house in Caché: unending, with no narrative, no change, no seeming purpose outside themselves. So why share it?

It is necessary, for other events, for a camera to unswervingly capture the agonies of an individual, or a nation. Pain and suffering DOES belong on the news: so too does reporting it objectively.

The word 'objective' is worth pausing over: post-modernism has torpedoed any sense of faith in 'objectivity'. Objectivity instead is always a relative term. The camera is not a passive nor innocent thing; it shapes and changes behaviour; and for the viewer it frames events into stories. Yet the objectivity - or otherwise - of the camera, is incredibly fluid; whilst in art we know it is oppressively present, it can be used with more urgency, and less calculation.

In a field such as journalism, especially within war and conflict reporting, the mere presence of a camera is important. Finding the right place, following the right people, until the filming can be done. But when recording takes place, there is little time, or consideration, for how 'objective' the framing. The focus is on what is in front of the camera, the rest, once the camera rolls, is simply trying to keep pace. Because the snatched footage from an al-Jazeera camera, or a mobile phone, are immediately in dialogue with a much bigger picture, a much bigger version of events.

Having a view into the torture and atrocities committed by non-elected and elected governments is imperative - and dangerous. In politics, video is perhaps the closest we can get to counterbalancing the mind-numbing (and often desensitising) raft of words - spoken or written - which use the recurrent themes: civilian casualties, air strike, unrest, humanitarian crisis. So in the context of ongoing unrest, the necessity of seeing a Syrian detainee being slapped and humiliated by a solider loyal to President Bashar al-Assad (in the link above), speaks for itself. It is not pain for pain's sake: it is one human face of the troubles which are recevied outside of the Middle East in largely dry and stylised (sterilised?) forms: reports, new legislations, meetings.

But in the context of the US Open Press Conference (and the endless press circuit), an athlete's cramp does not speak for itself; and footage of this is useless, empty, unless we can understand where it fits. Those 2 minutes become a strangely dull pornography, where the viewer persists in the hope of a weird titillation or enough disgust to turn off: haha he looks like he's getting a blowjob...Oh my god isn't this terrible and awful!!!...yeah but isn't it still kind of hot...

For the most part, the video does little but raise an odd, passive aggressive disinterest, much like the disinterest of that 'unobtrusive' camera, turning us into the gawping rest of the press conference. Which is what makes this little glimpse of a player in pain so weird. It has no story; no outcome. The big games of professional tennis, unlike most other sports, give the viewer unblinkingly direct access to the players in moments that merge agony and ecstasy; and those emotions are always part of a bigger narrative. We're driven to expect them: but to expect them in the right places, like finals, career-defining moments.

Like with Caché, the presence of the camera here is not the dangerous thing: the viewer is. So far beyond the argument for the objective gaze, we now give the camera an overwhelming subjectivity, projecting our own meanings or feelings, filling in the gaps the way you might in a film, or an art installation.
It has to be telling us...something...it must be watching for a reason....
Thanks to the increasingly theatrical coverage of sport in the UK, even the journalistic camera is expected to give us a gazumping great tragedy, or triumph - rather than simpy document a passing moment. (And that's what Haneke's film plays with so brilliantly...in fact, maybe the overblown trailer was deliberate - to further highlight the expectation for titillation that the viewer presents.)

Of course, the journalists present to question Nadal were doing their job; what is more, no doubt the footage stops when it does because afterwards other figures rush in and the moment is lost. But those lonely 2 minutes are a curious pause for reflection: on the state of empathy in a culture which so obsessively yearns for any taste of the extraordinary and exalted few that it becomes distracted, and defined, by the mediocre.

But let the extraordinary be the focus once again. In tennis terms at least, Nadal (as the Guardian's Kevin Mitchell wrote) 'is back'.

hyperbole, literally: football pundits and political mother

I have always been prone to exaggeration.

When I was younger, I loved hyperbole. Not in an adolescent ‘I hate my life’ way (I didn’t), but more in a ‘what can language do’ way. Even before my oestrogen levels took a hike, I had a tendency to get a bit passionate in conversation, and swing between outright worship or mistrustful indignation and anger. It got other people to react and it was fun to see what language could do.

But lately, in conversation, I've noticed another, more generalised use of hyperbole. I use it the same way I rub invisible bits of dirt in the corner of my eye: to put painful, laborious emphasis on something that wasn't there in the first place.

It’s a tendency I dislike in others and myself - ‘it was the worst night of my life’ about a fairly routine Friday evening; 'I'm dying here' on a slightly fatigued Monday morning in the office. Being 'ok' is not enough, we have to be 'great' or 'on the edge'. A linguistic muddle where the mundane has become the startlingly extreme.

On the Guardian's football homepage this weekend, there was this article on a similar phenomenon: the desperately hyperbolic football punditry of Jamie Redknapp and his categorisation of 'top top top top' players.

(Jamie Redknapp this is not personal; you were an affable Liverpool captain and pretty good player, but it is difficult impossible to understand your habit of making terrible adverts and inability to buy a pair of trousers that fit...just one size up, and you’ll be able to stay seated without wincing. Imagine the freedom!)

'top top top top' is an example of hyperbole that remains mostly within the football punditry world; a world without a clear, common consensus by which to judge quality. But what about Jamie's love of 'literally'? Redknapp uses it all the time. The video link in the previous sentence is just one case in point. Commenting on the difficulty of defending against the Gunners in 2009, tells us- "you literally have to have your head on a swivel as a defender".

Aside from the fact that now it’s possible to survive the Arsenal defence with severe whiplash, there’s something more troubling – and recognisable - going on with Jamie’s turn of phrase.

‘literally’ here makes the real unreal, spinning us into a realm where footballers, like owl-ish marionettes, are all swivelling their heads in contentment to stop Cesc Fabregas. Instead of taking us to the concrete, it refers to some imagined, virtual playground of sorry metaphors that we're all assumed to have in common.

And that’s the scary thing. Jamie's punditry is symptomatic of a widespread anxiety of communication. We use ‘literally’ all the time, without even hearing it, to say things we don’t – can’t - think or feel.

‘I was literally on fire’

‘It was a nightmare....literally.’

We even use it to emphasise things we would do –

‘I literally want to take all my clothes off.’

- but we'll never do them, of course, because we can just say it really, really, like, strongly...

The result isn’t just a weird hiccup of meaning. It's a crisis: a rift in social communication and subjective experience.

The tendency to say we 'love' things when we don't, or describe anything as the 'most x experience of my entire life' masks an insecurity about how we experience, understand and communicate our feelings. They're flourishes of social storytelling which happens most acutely with groups of three or more people. We feel some invisible pressure to present ourselves, and our lives, as sensational.

But what does that mean for those big, sensational experiences when a hyperbolic, ‘unreal’ figure of speech, would usually have been used. Linguistic hyperbole, a collection of wildly exaggerated empty phrases, is used by me, and the Sky Sports pundits, and lots of our friends, to refer to nothing but other figures of speech. How can we get closer to the truth when the adverbs denoting 'the real' or the true have been hijacked? Can we understand how we feel if we can’t rightly express it?

The first time I saw Hofesh Shechter's Political Mother, on July 15th 2010, I emerged from the auditorium flapping and crunching and convulsing inside (I did convulse outside too- in the toilet though; Sadlers Wells audiences are polite). It was an almost religious experience. And trying to communicate that, it wasn't even like I wanted to use big words or extravagant speech; but like I had a massive phrase inside me, in my nerves and my blood. The only way to communicate...whatever it was...was in shapes, movement, shouts.

I saw the show twice last week, 'The Choreographer's Cut', on its return to Sadlers Wells. And as I left, that feeling came back again: like I needed to bounce around everyone; like I had devoured language; hyperbole was pointless.

Political Mother is so loud, so visually frantic and so powerfully manipulated that you can barely think, only feel its argument, the frustration and fury, recognise the enslavement of all these brothers and sisters in humanity, fighting against their own bodies, having their movements and freedoms released and absorbed and appended by all manner of shifting lofty powers - the band; rhythm itself; the lights; the military dictator, the politician, the rock god persona screaming and contorting atop the stage.

It shows us how power shapes and squeezes the way humans communicate. How we share the same human impulse to commune, to express and share with others. And how the rhetoric of power, of the state, orders and organizes physical movement; and how the very shape and organisation of these movements dictates the impulses and shapes of the rebellions against them.

But it isn’t a simple case of institution=bad, individual=good. Rather, Political Mother literalises hyperbole. It shoves political exaggeration down into the body and its synapses, then let’s it play out amongst a group of people. How this squeezing and organising of impulses shoots off in new directions - new dances – but also how the same shapes come back around.

All these recurring themes: raised arms and bowed heads of the dancers, which arises again and again; lined up facing the audience, overseen by a man in a gorilla mask; backs to the audience, sat down obediently, arms raised to the rock bad above. And their faces – either downcast, chins to their chests, heads bowed; or reverently upwards, the tilt of a worshipper, be it of a late night rave or a military dictator; or both at the same time, headbanging in what seems like the smoothest, most cohesive wave.

It’s dance as an argument, made all the more true, and apt when text intervenes at the very end, coyly illuminating LEDS in pairs of words:

WHERE THERE IS PRESSURE THERE IS FOLKDANCE

The text is both a dictum and a joke; a statement made tautological when you actually see the bodies DOING it.

And when this phrase flashes up, with some titters of laughter, you realise just how profoundly you have been sucked into the argument too.

We are another group, crowd, that is being exercised upon by the rhetoric of power. The dancers, for the most part, face the same way as us. They see what we see. We see their backs, as they too stare up at the flashing lights; we look the same way, up at the figures of power, with a mixture of fear, disbelief, excitement and, at times, reticence. (The wonderful moment when one by one the worshippers turn away as their buttoned up politician does some dancing of his own.)

For me the show is not a straight criticism of structures of all power, but of believing too much, of giving up totally to the 'logic' of the rhetoric, the logic of the system. Losing your grip on reality - and in turn losing your grip on your body, and how you express the most simple of impulses and feelings. Which is why audiences leave so energised, so hyped: because they have been pumped full of this message and set back onto the world, suddenly released from the darkness of the auditorium into the drizzly greylight of the street.

And ultimately that argument doesn’t just take place on stage: it takes place in the spectator, in the feelings and assaults on the senses. Does it just make us another appended body, another absorber of rhetoric? Probably.

But experiencing Political Mother is experiencing why language is so muddled at the moment...it makes real and tangible the rhetorical desperation, the trying to pin down security, meaning, of life. It makes expressing yourself, physical expression, a crisis. Just because we don’t believe extreme language anymore doesn’t mean that extremity and its consequences have gone away. Hyperbole itself has become irrelevant in language, but desperate in feeling.

getting myself lost in translation: rosemary butcher

One of the main developments in my activities over the blog's dormant period has been a growing interest in dance. Hofesh Shechter's Political Mother remains one of the highlights of my year, along with two strikingly different performances seen in February: the intimate trio of 'With Which To Tell' at RAG, and the fascinating intricacy and breadth of Danza Contemporanea de Cuba's first visit to the UK.

I mention this because writing about dance inevitably means that I come with a theatrical rather than purely choreographic perspective to the shows. Whilst I have been expanding the range of contemporary work I have seen, and reading where I can, I am well aware that part of what excites me about dance is the thrill of being mid-discovery of it, still not sure of the vocabulary and history with which to contextualise the images and energies in performance. However I have never felt that this has been an obstacle to my enjoyment or engagement with any dance piece, as what I lack in technical understanding, I supplement with a kind of visceral experiential fascination, and a particular attention to how the shifts and shapings of a dance can tell so much about drama and performance.

With this in mind, I would like to offer a few thoughts on Rosemary Butcher's Lapped Translated Lines last Friday night, part of the Festival of Miniatures which she curated at Sadler's Wells' Lilian Baylis Studio. Butcher is celebrated as a truly unique, minimalist choreographer, and this work seems to be no different in presenting a pared-down, meditative piece of solo dance, performed by Elena Gianotti.

It was easy to see how the piece's construction related to the title: in the back corner, upstage right, were two overlapped metal structures, tracing silver lines almost like a heartbeat monitor pulled out of shape. Upstage right, a huge screen projecting an equally meditative, slow film of Gianotti performing the movements we saw live, but crucially unsynchronised and shot with extreme close-up at times, disorientating our sense of the very fixed routes which the dance was taking. Indeed, it was only in the form of this live presence that we saw the guidelines and fixed points of the piece, the straight lines on the floor which the dancer was tracing and building upon. Gianotti was something to be read: her movement seemed to make sense of and justify the presence of each element. Her dance became something between an argument and a meditation on the piece's existence.

And it is with this idea of meditation and live presence that I'd like to stay for a moment. Gianotti, and Butcher's choreography had a long applause at the end - and deservedly so because it was evident that the dancer had worked hard and that this kind of project signified a huge journey for those involved. However the audience was in no way part of this. The piece felt...esoteric, uninterested in those watching - even in the moments when Gianotti turned, painstakingly slowly to eyeball us in the dark.

Indeed, the slowness was one of the things which I found myself getting frustrated at. The piece refused to engage with any rate of change, always moving forward at the same pace: lapped rather than overlapped, stubbornly repeating structures at the same pace. I enjoyed the seeming arbitrariness of the ending - it could have happened at any point, I felt - but this was the first dance show I've seen where I have felt that terrible pang of the lonely audience member "but I don't understand it!".

I am always telling myself and others that performance, dance and theatre equally included, isn't meant to be simply 'understood'. And I believe that. Perhaps as someone with only very basic experience as a dancer, I did not fully appreciate the technical work of the piece. Yet I know that that isn't it.

My problem remains the fact that it seemed to lack...performance. I've never seen a dance piece before that wasn't also a performance. That magic thing that creates a triangle on stage, rather than a flat line between actor and director, making the audience feel like a peeping tom or unwelcome voyeur. This felt like second circle drama: the performer was working hard, and pushing through something, but connected only with the rehearsal process and offstage crew, with little concern as to what we were to do as viewers (and I heard several people in the audience echo these sentiments).

I wasn't surprised that Judith Mackrell's review for the Guardian was glowing, but I was surprised how lightly it skimmed across the surface of the piece. This was, if anything, a very intellectual and intellectualising piece of dance, in which it was difficult to see anything but the mind thinking. Like the looping film and metal sculptures, it seemed to be a lot of pre-fabricated structures being repeated and carefully measured. For all Gianotti's grace and precision, her body didn't seem alive so much as under total obeyance of her head, calculated and concentrating, with her memory slowly drawing the images and impositions around her.

I would love to hear from others who saw the show and have something to contribute - I am more than aware that my opinion of the piece will no doubt change over time, and my understanding of Butcher's practice will get deeper. None of my reaction is in any way due to feeling that it was 'bad': rather, I could understand how it was good, and clever and philosophical, but I couldn't see or feel it. I'm a simple girl: I like to see bodies moving, that's why I like theatre, it's why I like sport, it's why I like dance and debate and gesture and anthropology. But I struggled to see anything dancing, being live, thinking physically: it felt like the retracing of a thought. And perhaps in making such a statement I am eschewing the very preconceptions about dance which Butcher's work challenges.